Hillary

            Hillary and I met in Elementary school. She asked if she could sit next to me on the morning bus, and of course I said yes. She was a mousey and thin, with tie-dyed shoes and a patchwork backpack. Her brown hair was wavy, like I’d always wanted mine to be, and her tiny glasses made her brown doe-eyes look impossibly huge. She had a little Tupperware container of spaghetti and meatballs, which she finished by the time we got to school. She’s been my best friend ever since.

            I went over to her house almost every day after school, and I would come home covered in paint and glitter and Popsicle sticks. Little by little, she showed me how fun a childhood could be. As a child of overprotective parents, the little secret excursions we took to the deli or the golf course were the most exhilarating moments of my life. In 15 years of being friends, she has never once yelled at me, criticized me, abandoned me or double-crossed me.

She seems untouchable by the media and society, never falling for popular trends, always eager to take the unconventional path. I got accepted to college, and she told me I should stay home and go fishing and paint with her forever.  I was sorely tempted. When my parents shook their heads knowingly and proclaimed that she would get nowhere in life, I almost punched them out. They don’t know her. She saved up $15,000 by the time she was 18, just from her massive babysitting ventures. She was happy with the simplest things, and I knew she’d be alright.

She was the one thing in my life I felt would never change. When my grandfather died, a piece of my childhood went with him. When my parents moved out of the house we’d had since I was born, I felt like I was being robbed of my memories. After all my friends from school faded away and forgot me, I knew that I could call her and she’d have the same voice, telling me the same funny stories, still plotting her half-baked schemes that would make us both famous and successful.

I think that’s what got me so upset when I found out she was pregnant. It wasn’t that she couldn’t care for the child; I knew I’d be hard-pressed to find someone more qualified. I didn’t feel sorry for her because of the child ruining her plans for her life, because she didn’t have any. She took everything in stride and lived one day at a time. Her boyfriend is a delightful boy, a little immature, but he loves her and has every intention of sticking around and supporting them. My reasons for being bothered were purely selfish reasons. I didn’t want her to change, and I didn’t want us to change. Once my mom got over the shock of the announcement, she told me that preserving the normalcy in our friendship was going to be a big, important job of mine, and that Hillary would probably be relying on me a lot for that. That made me feel better; it was my job to make sure Hillary didn’t feel like this was changing anything.

As of right now, Elsie May Hutchins is fifteen days away from becoming a person on this earth. She’s going to have a wonderful mother, father and two kick-ass aunts: Myself, and Hillary’s sister Amanda. She won’t be one of those children glued to a PSP; she’ll have arts and crafts, a fishing pole, and long legs. But if I’m going to maintain my relationship with her mom, that baby is going to have to get used to spending the first years of her life in and out of Target, World Market and Sheetz.